In most studies of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, identity politics focuses on nationalism. Unfortunately, very few examine regional identities and how they too are politicized in similar ways for similar reasons. Istria provides a good example of how identity is politicized and how and why individuals adapt it to both internal and external influences. While in the past local and regional identities were politicized in response to colonization, more recently national divisions became more prominent. However, in the very recent past, Istrian identity again became politicized as many natives drew lines between themselves and what they saw as an external national influence emanating from Zagreb. In the 1990s, a renewed Croatian national movement competed with an Istrian regional movement. Istrian regionalists, seeking to justify taking and maintaining regional power and hoping to more quickly bring Croatia into the European Union, used this new political tactic against the nationalizing Croatian government. While both the nationalists and the regionalists claimed the other side's ideology was foreign to Istria, in actuality both have historical roots in the region. Though the competition was not as virulent as in past episodes of nationalist tension between Italians and Croats, it does fit a pattern of continuity in the region.

De par leur but et leur destination, les traductions, dans l'Union soviétique, sont étroitement unies à la politique promue par les autorités dans le domaine de la langue, en tant que “partie composante de la politique nationale”. Sous cet aspect, elles s'encadrent de manière naturelle dans la fameuse formule-triptique de l'historiographie de l'URSS: “épanouissement — rapprochement — fusion” des nations soviétiques, et, implicitement, de leurs langues et cultures.

In his recently published article, “The Turks of Bulgaria: The Struggle for National-Religious Survival of a Muslim Minority,” Kemal H. Karpat addresses an important and sensitive topic. The manner in which he undertakes to explore it, however, leaves much to be desired.

For several centuries the overall trend in the world development has been along the way paved by Western civilization. Hence, the predominant flow has been based on borrowed Western cultural features. The issue of cultural interaction among nations with different culture types became fairly topical in contemporary society. Humankind now faces the legacy of moral decline of the past century and is trying to find a way out of its ideological dead end through other cultures and civilizations. In addition, the globalization processes that developed towards the end of the last century have also embraced the nations' cultural ties, turning the cross-cultural communication into an integral part of humankind's existence. The unique role of Russia in Northeastern Asia calls for an answer to the following question: Is there any cultural interaction between the Russian Far East, on the one hand, and the East Asian nations, on the other? And if so, what are its manifestations and how big are they?

This paper is about the life experiences of selected individuals who, five years after Ukrainian independence, had emerged as key leaders in post-Soviet Ukraine, a society undergoing deep social and political transformations. In this paper, I argue that under these circumstances, these individuals became both the “children” and “agents” of change. In exploring this idea, I will focus on the moment in their life stories when each narrator identifies the moment when he or she began to act as an “agent” of change. More specifically, I will examine circumstances that transformed these individuals into new leaders at this unique social and political juncture in Ukraine's history. My working hypothesis is that, in addition to direct factors and a certain element of chance, other factors in their earlier biographies, during the Soviet period, have had lasting importance on these leaders' development.

Perhaps no country in Eastern Europe suffered the human, material, and psychological devastation that Poland experienced during nearly six long years of war and occupation. Caught initially between Soviet Communism and German Nazism, and eventually falling completely under the yoke of the latter, the country became the target of ruthless attempts to impose these totalitarian systems on the hapless vanquished population. Without dismissing the sufferings of the ethnic Poles, this paper will focus on the fortunes of the key ethnoreligious minority groups in prewar Poland — the Germans, Belorussians, Ukrainians, and Jews. It will attempt to portray not only the relationship between the occupying powers and the individual minorities, but also the relationships among those population segments in the face of a concerted challenge to their very existence.